Summary

In this chapter, you've had an overview of the cool Web Part Framework introduced in ASP.NET 2.0. You can probably reproduce everything built here in only minutes, especially the visual drag and drop, whereas if you used custom DHTML and personalization storage, it would have taken several weeks or more (if you factor in debugging and testing time). Because of this, ASP.NET's personalization framework is truly something to appreciate, not only because of the spectacular appeal to users, but also because most of the difficult code needed to make this work right was already written by Microsoft! A small amount of developer time will multiply the value of your site to end users. The ASP.NET controls wrap the complex JavaScript code needed to give us the awesome client-side effects, and you can reuse your previous work to turn any control into a dragable and user-customizable piece of content.

Some of the more advanced features such as connections and custom editor parts weren't covered here, but if you're interested in going deeper you can find entire books dedicated to the subject, such as Wrox's Professional Web Parts and Custom Controls with ASP.NET 2.0, by Peter Vogel.

In the next chapter, you'll build the last part of the site: localization support, i.e., dynamically translating the site to different languages, according to the favorite language selected by the user in his profile.